


Giving It Your Best Shot

by Kieron_ODuibhir



Series: Cirque de Triomphe [53]
Category: Batman (Comics), Batman - All Media Types, DCU
Genre: Angst, Blood, Courage, Drama, Earth-3, Gen, Magic, Mind Control, Mirror Universe, Parent-Child Relationship, Shapeshifting, Silver Bullet, Surgery, Swords, Teamwork, definitions of freedom
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-29
Updated: 2015-11-11
Packaged: 2018-04-28 16:56:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 5,846
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5098244
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kieron_ODuibhir/pseuds/Kieron_ODuibhir
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Red Hood's sword flashes out in one of Talon's signature moves, licks along Strawman's thin arm, and arcs around, trailed by a stream of Jon's blood, to jab for his throat.</p><p>And it would sink straight in, parting flesh and sinew for good, except that before the steel can bite, the Reformer hits the Hood like a mudslide, bodyslams him straight through a carved wooden chair and into the wall.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. play my part

Red Hood's sword flashes out in one of Talon's moves, licks along Strawman's thin arm, and arcs around, trailed by a stream of Jon's blood, to jab for his throat.

And it would sink straight in, parting flesh and sinew for good, except that before the steel can bite, the Reformer hits the Hood like a mudslide, bodyslams him straight through a carved wooden chair and into the wall. For whole heart-stopped seconds it seems like that will keep him there, plastered under everything Basil could find to throw, and then the lump that is Jason thrashes, heaves, and then _slices_ its way out through the clinging claylike stuff. It doesn't really hurt Basil, of course, but it does set Jason free, and he lunges without hesitation at Enigma even as his chest is still heaving to counteract the brief suffocation.

When Enigma's stick bats the oncoming blade aside, so it only cuts a shallow gash through the side of his scalp to match the one on his leg, and lodges deep in the wood of the polished chest of drawers behind him, it's more luck than skill. Than something Ed has _any_ assurance of repeating. So he moves, as fast as he can, away and out into the center of the room, while Red Hood (still in the heavy denim and leather layers of his costume) flips himself smoothly up onto the top of the impaled bureau, so he can pull his weapon free without bringing the furnishing down on his head.

Launches, from that crouch, into a long arc that should land him roughly on top of Enigma, more acrobatic than he's been since before he hit that last big growth spurt and started to really fill out, but the Reformer swells up to intercept, throwing up new hands one after another to wrap and bind and _stop_ even as Jason does his level best to get at someone, _anyone_ he can hurt.

For a second, Basil gets Jason pinned down again, twitching in the gooey loops of his body, more inhuman in extremity than he ever likes to let himself get, and Strawman and Enigma dart in, the former with an aerosol of his best knockout gas and the latter with nothing but his cane. Jon squirts one puff of the blue stuff straight in Jason's face, and _that's_ when their rogue does some kind of bucking, _twisting_ thing to free himself, and very nearly takes both their heads off in one swipe.

Only fails at double decapitation because Basil, realizing that they'd been played, lashed out just in time with a shapeless limb and knocked their friends back, out of harm's way.

Jon sprawls across the floor, Ed bounces off the side of the towering four-poster bed; Red Hood still almost successfully skewers the latter with a last-ditch lunge, which turns into an imbalanced _lurch_ as a bullet, fired from less than twenty feet away, drills into his left shoulder, throwing him off so far he goes almost into a spin.

Nearly falls, leaving himself open to the Reformer's next tackle, and loses his sword to a clay-lump that envelops his arm. The shoulder wound is already healing up, lead plug that had buried itself in his shoulder-blade rattling to the floor, and as he returns to fighting his way free of Basil Karlo's _expansive_ approach to wrestling, there's no sign that Strawman's sleeping gas has had any effect. Which is not normal, even for a Talon.

Jason's gaze falls on Jokester just once, as he struggles, as he covertly wings a knife not meant for throwing at Strawman's heart and it glances off his ribs. If there's an expression in his eyes, it's too subtle to see at this distance, but his lips move. Silent, and slow, and unmistakeable even as his limbs fight Basil's protective hold with a maniacal, mechanical intensity that only normally appears anymore when he's desperate to save somebody.

_Please, J._

Jokester swallows. Knows he's reached and passed the limit for how long he can stand here, doing nothing. Even though he has no real option about the standing, and all too few about the _something_ he can do.

 _"Silver bullet to the heart,"_ the ghoulish waste-of-air that did this said. Chuckling, a cultured, detached sort of chuckle J _**did not like** ,_ though could be he's prejudiced. _"A traditional mode of putting down a monster. The only way to break the curse. Any silver would do, of course, so long as it pierces the heart, but I find that's rather a tiresome organ to access with, for example, a spoon._ "

And then he _threw a silver bullet_ right at J's face, and _disappeared._ That rolling Oscar Wilde chuckle trailing behind him.

J's hand flashed up to catch the bright, tiny thing before it could black his eye, and as soon as he touched it, some invisible force lashed out of nothingness and pinned him magically to the spot. A sitting duck for the rampaging Red Hood, if their three still-mobile friends hadn't been throwing themselves in the way, trying to bring their youngest member down before he could kill anybody.

Or at least lure him into another room, where he could try fruitlessly to dice Basil until the rest of them figure out how to fix this, what to do about a compulsion like _kill until he runs out of targets, and then turn on himself._

And it really shows precisely the _kind_ of twisty black-hearted sadist Jason Blood has always been, that he targeted their Jason for this. Jason who has had a lifetime's worth and more already of being forced to kill, of having his choices taken away. But also Jason who, of all of them, can survive the cure.

Who can probably survive it.

Might.

…they'd never even consider it, if it were anyone else. Even if they asked, like he _knows_ Jason just did, because that young man would never beg for his own life, especially not when anyone else was in danger.

If Heat Sink and Deep Freeze had only made it this far, instead of having to stop and do emergency repairs on Freeze's environmental suit after Etrigan trashed it. (Not that it was Etrigan's fault, J knows; he seems alright, for a demon, but he doesn't have a _choice_ , any more than Jaybird does right now.) The ice duo are good at immobilization, and Jason would have a hard enough time successfully killing himself with _full_ mobility, never mind pinned in ice while they worked on a solution…maybe they could get a long, thin silver _pin_ to pierce the ribcage and—

The bullet, cased in some chrome-shiny metal he doesn't recognize, is exactly the right size to go in his revolver, because of course it is, and his hands already started to swap out the round in the top chamber by feel as soon as Jason said _please_. Then he had to tear his eyes off the fight to make sure the cylinder was lined up okay and the gun wasn't jammed or anything, and now he's hesitating. He never hesitates. Waits, sure. Pauses, yes. Creates dramatic tension, he does that. Occasionally, he waffles. But hesitate?

There has to be another way. Jason always sees himself as expendable, and he's always been so wrong.

The Red Hood presses his emergency taser-button into the middle of his opponent's face and lets out the full charge, and Basil seizes, shouts, and sinks into a puddle of brown goo.

Unhesitating, the assassin reclaims his sword from the mess and lunges for Enigma again, on the apparent basis of his being the closest warm body.

 _Strawman_ hits him in a flying tackle, this time, which is marginally effective mostly because Jason never expected it. It's not that Jon isn't brave, because he is, he's the bravest, considering he's scared of _everything_ and he still does this with them; it's just that Jason outweighs him by a conservative hundred pounds. Then in the next instants the ensorcelled Hood has taken control of the tackle, turned it into a roll, and pinned Jon under him. J got a look at his face, as they grappled—blank. Perfectly expressionless. More perfect than it was most of the time even when he was Talon. As unreadable as his back, now, as he draws himself up, keeping his victim in place with a knee on his diaphragm. Jon gasps, and claws, and his feet kick at nothing, and it doesn't matter.

The sword comes up—slower than necessary, pointing straight down as though to dramatize the imminent bisection of Strawman's throat, but still not slow enough for Ed to get there in time, even though he's sprinting flat-out across the room, straight through the muddy puddle of Basil, lurching on the injured leg, with his question-mark-cane held over his head like a club.

Last second. No hesitation from the Hood. Jon's going to die. Jason said please. Jason's had so many choices taken away from him.

Jokester takes the shot.


	2. you're to blame

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (I know I am bad but at least I am updating quickly!)

The instant the pale bullet leaves the barrel, Jokester feels the bonds around his legs vanish. The fraction of time it takes for the shot to reach its target isn't enough to make any significant movement, but it is enough to think a huge flood of frustrated thoughts, because if all it took was _firing_ the thing to get him out of here, they maybe could have drawn this out after all.

(Though it's magic so maybe the _firing at Jason_ or _firing at Jason's heart_ intentions were also conditions, which'd mean shooting it anywhere else might have left him rooted to the spot in Jason Blood's bedroom _forever_. Which doesn't mean he shouldn't've tried it. _Crud._ )

Then the bullet has hit and Jason crumples, just like any normal person shot in the back, his sword clattering to the ground beside him without ever touching Jon. And the Jokester is already running, getting to Jason just too late to stop him falling onto his back, cupping a hand around the back of his neck and running the other over his chest, looking fruitlessly for the exit wound. Jason's eyes are closed.

He hears himself babbling, a long way off.

"I'm sorry, Jaybird, I'm so, so, sorry. JJ, look at me, come on, _Jason._ " His thumb can't find a pulse, his palm can't find a heartbeat, which means his marksmanship was probably A+, straight to the heart, go Jokester.

He's been here, like this, too many times. Because Jason thinks he's expendable. Never quite like _this,_ or they'd know whether he could survive a magic silver bullet to the heart. But _like_ this. The Martian invasion, to take an example, was one long parade of near-death experiences for everybody. But J's never been the one who did the shooting, before. (Not that this is the first time he's shot Jason ever. Because shooting out Talon's knees was always a good way of slowing him down when you were running away. But that was different, that was so different.)

Tiny, tiny breaths still whisper through the slack mouth, though, and when he pries up one lid the blue eye shuttles, not alert but alive. Talon. It's strange how J can hate wholeheartedly that anyone has ever been put through that, let alone anyone he loves, and yet thank all his stars roughly once a month that his boy is all but unkillable.

"J…" It's Eddie, standing over them with his hands wrapped uncomfortably around the middle of his cane.

Jon has folded up to sitting from where Jason had him on the floor and is watching, hands clasped together in his lap. He's panting raggedly beneath the rough brown fabric of his mask, trying to make up for that long suffocating half-minute he spent with Jason's full weight pressing under his breastbone. Still bleeding where Jason's knife sliced into his chest, and from his arm where the sword caught him earlier. They'll both take stitches, but they're flesh wounds. They'll keep. Jokester rips his eyes away ruthlessly. Drops them back to Jason.

He's not healing.

"We have to get the bullet out," J says, and then snorts with half-hysteria at himself, because there he goes, spouting the worst medical-drama cliché of failure to understand actual medicine, and Harley would swat him upside the head. Except she'd agree it's _true,_ this is Jason who doesn't need normal treatment but definitely can't keep the magic bullet in his chest.

"I'm not a surgeon!" Strawman moans, already digging into a pocket for the sealed packet of sterile gloves he keeps in case of field medicine. He's rolled up onto his knees while J wasn't paying attention.

"Well, good, because we don't have a surgical theatre for you. He's not gonna make it to Leslie's."

Jon nods, absently, irritably, already falling into the jerky patterns of motion he uses when he has to be in control of a situation, whether he thinks he's up to it or not. Reaches up and rips his mask off, because it cuts into his vision and he'll need to see for this, drops the burlap like trash on top of his gloves. "Get that table cleared off," he orders Ed, as he loops gauze around the wound in his forearm.

"On it," huffs Basil, surging up abruptly out of the puddle Jason's electrocution left him in and into his own shape again, like a piece of poorly animated special effects in fast forward, and then staggers against the edge of the cluttered table, knocking over an unlabeled tall purple bottle, which clinks ominously against the other bottles and jars of what are presumably magical paraphernalia, though for all J knows they could be cologne.

"Not like that!" Jon yelps, and then shakes himself back into Doctor mode. " _You_ sit down," he tells Basil, so firmly that the awkward angle of his wrist as he knots his bandage tightly almost fails to seem absurd. Someone should have helped him with that, Jokester notes distantly. He should have asked someone for help.

"Knife," Jon commands J, as Ed goes to start gathering things from the worktable and dumping them onto the first available surface, which appears to be Blood's sumptuous canopied bed. J hands over his smallest knife, which Jon uses to slice Jason's shirt open, and then the two of them slide him carefully out of his jacket and the remains of the shirt—it was a nice shirt; he's going to be mad, though if he really cared about it he wouldn't have worn it into a fight, with his rate of injury. Unless he's been forgetting to do his laundry, or something.

J knows he should go help Ed get the table clear—Basil already is, against orders, in a cautious, creaky sort of way, although creaky for him means bending where he doesn't look like he has joints—but he can't tear himself away from holding Jason up and making sure those thin, thin breaths are still coming in and out.

How much good can breathing _do,_ if he doesn't have a heartbeat?

"Forward, now," Jon says, and between them they tip the young man's face into Jokester's shoulder to get a look at his back, where the entry wound has stopped bleeding, but not closed. "I'm going to have to go in the front," Jon says, worrying at the corner of his mouth with a canine tooth. "Scapula is too much in the way from the back." He raises his eyes to J's, solemn. "And I'm going to need either a bone saw or some kind of rib spreader. This is going to be nasty, J."

He feels his hand tighten on the back of Jason's neck, protective, like holding him tighter could possibly help. "I can handle it."

"J—"

"I can _handle_ it. Let's stop wasting time." Jason doesn't have much of it.

Jon nods, and that's when Ed bustles over with Blood's fancy brocade bedspread. They lift Jason onto it and then each grab an edge to carry him to the table, as carefully as they can manage but inevitably with swaying and jostling that _can't_ help his condition. Talon's injuries are governed by different rules than the normal ones, but so are magic bullets, and normally J is perfectly okay not knowing exactly what the rules are for things, but at moments like this he wishes—

"I wish Waylon were here," Jon mutters, bending over his patient, and Jokester has already opened his mouth to say no, that was not how that thought ended, and anyway, why Waylon? Then he gets it.

Jon needs something to serve as a rib-spreader. Waylon's hands would do nicely.

And J almost sicks up, because he already had to kill Jason once today, and now Jon is having to vivisect him; it seems like a jerk move to wish the dismembering experience on Croc. He's always had the strength and the claws to tear a human being apart if he wanted, but he's never _done_ it. Never would. But if he had to—if a friend _needed_ him to—

"I can do it," says Basil. And he's an actor, and a shapeshifter who doesn't actually have blood anymore, so that expression of calm resolve and his face's failure to have lost all its color don't actually mean much, but it's a nice gesture. He kept almost all the hoarseness out of his voice, even, and what's left he could blame on the electrocution if he had to. "You know how strong I can be, if I shift right," he tells Jon. "Make the incision. I'll do the rest."

"Here," Jokester says abruptly, straightening from where he spent the last few seconds digging into the sheath in Jason's left boot so he didn't have to look any of his friends in the eye.

The knife the Red Hood keeps there is single-edged, thin as a whisper, sharp as a lie, and curved at the tip—the most like Talon's knives of anything he carries, because it's his holdout, last-ditch weapon and needs to be the thing he can use the most instinctively. It's also the thing most like a scalpel in the room, unless Blood considerately left them one, and even then J would rather risk the six-inch combat blade they can at least trust not to be cursed or poisoned.

Jon looks at it with a kind of weary, accepting horror, and Ed says, "I found a bottle of brandy when I was clearing the table. Sterilize?"

Talon's system is better against infection than most, but it's not 100%. On the other hand, potentially evil brandy in Jason's _heart._

"I have hand sanitizer and antibiotic ointment," Strawman says firmly, already pulling them out of more of his endless pockets. "This is barbaric enough without decanting liquor into anybody's internal organs."

He holds up the little blue spritzer of his standard sleep formula then, smudged already with bloody fingerprints from the fight. "Think I should risk it?"

J's teeth crunch down on the scar that runs the inside length of his right cheek. Tasting blood does _not_ help his state of mind. "No," he makes himself say.

They're going to cut into Jason's chest and rip him open and dig into his _heart,_ and no one should have to live through that with any degree of consciousness.

But the kid is probably riding the edge of slipping away already. He already had a solid dose, and even if it didn't seem to affect him it's probably still in his system. They can't afford to suppress his brain function any further, even to spare him. God knows Jason can take a lot of pain.

Jon closes his eyes. "Alright, then," he says. Carefully wipes and sterilizes his hands and his surgical instrument, before he pulls the latex gloves on, and then spreads some of the sanitizer over Jason's chest, gently, like it matters. Like any germs that can't handle Purell are likely to be a problem for Talon's immune system, or like there's any chance of Jason surviving if his healing factor _doesn't_ come back online once the magic bullet is out. Jason shivers as the alcohol-based gel sucks the heat out of his skin, eyelids fluttering over sightlessly staring eyes, and he looks so _young._

 _Get on with it!_ J wants to snap, so much he's biting his tongue now just to shut himself up, because Jason may not have the time to waste, but _he_ already made his decision. He took his shot. If Jon carves the kid open and _then_ he dies, Jon needs to have done this. Followed something like the right procedures, as well as he could.

"J, Ed," Jon says, very levelly. "I need you to hold him down. Just in case." Because Jason hasn't shown any sign of awareness or capacity for voluntary motion since he went down, or reacted specifically to the feeling of a bullet in his heart, but if his hindbrain is online enough to breathe and to shiver…it will probably react to this. How could it not?

J almost taps out right then—almost insists they use the sleeping gas after all, or lets his eyes roll up in his head and falls into a faint so he can get out of living through this nightmare. But he's taught himself too well and too long to push onward through things that hurt for that to happen by accident, and he _won't_ ask more of someone else than he's willing to give, he _won't—_ and so he locks gamely onto Jason's right arm with all his strength, opposite Eddie on the left, while Basil pours himself over Jason's legs and rears up, his arms swelling to five times their natural size and then tapering, where he should have hands, into two tiny, flat paddles.

And Jon steps up, takes a deep breath, and makes the first incision.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I thought 'Hell's Heart' was going to be the furthest I went in this direction, but Jason's cosmically bad luck and that screwed-up healing factor keep finding new ways to mess with me. The plus side is, nobody here _wants_ to hurt anyone.


	3. a bad name

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I suspect this is obvious after last chapter, but WARNING that this one opens with a semi-graphic description of emergency heart surgery without anaesthesia, on a patient not conscious enough to give consent. 
> 
> If you don't want to read that, but _do_ want to know how this turns out, scroll about halfway down the page. To "you've done everything you can."

Jason doesn't scream. Jokester isn't sure whether that's the worst part or a small mercy, but he _doesn't_ scream, and he barely flails. More than anything, J hopes Jason doesn't know it's them. Because there's no way he's coherent enough to know _why_ they're doing this, to understand about emergency surgery, but—it took so long to make the kid believe it didn't matter what he used to be, that they weren't going to drop him, or turn on him, that they weren't going to realize one day how much blood he had on his hands and start blaming him for it.

And he _just_ tried to kill them again.

If he knows what's going on, even a little, if those staring eyes are taking in Jokester clamped onto his dominant arm, trapping him, Enigma on the other side, Strawman standing over him with the burning knife, Reformer prying him open like an oyster to get at his heart…he's going to think it's a _punishment_.

He's going to think it's punishment he _deserves_.

Basil is sliding those paddle-hands into the gap Jon's created between Jason's ribs, and then he starts to pull.

 _Now_ Jason screams, rough and high and inhuman, spasms and J almost loses his grip but clings tight, hands locked around Jaybird's wrist, body folded around his strong right arm to hold the shoulder in place as Jason's fingers dig into the back of his hand, clawing. If it weren't for the protection of their gloves, J would be bleeding too. Like Jason, whose blood has saturated a wide patch of the fancy bedspread and is beginning to drip out of one edge and onto the floor, like Jon whose bandages are beginning to seep red as he works grimly, slicing apart layers of tissue one by one. Has to get to the heart without hurting the lung, minimum goal. He wasn't ever trained for this.

"Basil, I need a little more room to work," Doctor Crane murmurs, and the Reformer prizes the gap a little wider.

It looks almost like Strawman is digging, now, as he disappears up to the wrist. Long narrow hands digging and slicing inside the chest cavity, and J looks away much too late to keep this out of his nightmares (no one expects him to have nightmares) until finally, _"There,"_ Jon is saying, and making one last precise cut before plucking an impossibly small, blood-covered knob out from the straining gap between Jason's ribs.

Sets it aside, on the table next to the patient because they don't have niceties like kidney-shaped dishes, and then dives back in, pressing all the things he cut apart back together so Jason's electrum-enhanced healing will have as little work to do as possible.

They've seen another former Talon, carved into sixths and set on fire, fail to recover from that final death. Jason isn't actually immortal. There is a point at which his body _will_ give up.

And his struggles have become so weak now that Jokester can afford to unwrap one arm from holding him still and hold it over the young man's lips, to sense the ghost of breath against the cuticles, more a spread of warmth than a gust of air pressure.

"Come on," he hears Eddie muttering, now that he can spare some strength from using his full weight to pin Jason's left arm. "Come on, kid, you aren't going out like this. How many wizards does it take to change a lightbulb, come _on_."

_Depends on what you want it changed into._

J's mouth shapes itself around the words noiselessly. He doesn't say them. Eddie probably doesn't realize he said anything. They hold on.

Their part of the job gets easier and easier and Jokester doesn't think he's ever wanted something to be difficult this badly in his _life._

"Okay, Reformer," Jon murmurs at last. "Let it go."

Basil's hands draw back carefully, splitting into fingers again as they go, and then he collapses, sliding off the end of the table like a spilled jello salad. He has legs again by the time he hits the floor, but they wobble, and Ed lets go of Jason's now-limp left arm to dart down and steady Basil, help him stay standing without having to give up the comfort of a human form. He's there almost too late, and J realizes distantly that normally, that probably would have been him; that Eddie was expecting it to be.

He isn't actually doing anything actually useful here. And it's not like he's _enjoying_ it. But all the same, it would take an earthquake to move him from this spot. To convince him to take the backs of his left-hand fingers away from those little puffs of heat or his right-hand fingertips off what _should_ be the pulse point in Jason's wrist.

Guilt isn't something Jokester has felt very often. He'd like to think that's because he doesn't do anything wrong, but he can be thoughtless, and thoughtlessness can grow cruel, no matter your intentions. And he's had those moments when you have to weigh one life against another, or run as fast as you can to save someone but it isn't quite fast enough.

Not that many. He's mad and clever and lucky. But it happens. He gets sad, when things go wrong. He apologizes, when _he's_ wrong, when he notices. Tries to make up for it. But he doesn't feel _guilty_ much at all. He isn't really set up for it. (Guilt is inconvenient, he's noticed, like fear; he doesn't know how normal people get _anything_ done if they're always fighting themselves.) But this time, he did this. He wasn't the bad guy but he was the one who _made the hard call,_ like the cops like to say, and that's not, that's not who he is, not who he ever wanted to be.

Jon is peering into Jason's chest cavity, biting his lip white. "I can't see whether he's starting to heal," he said. "There's too much blood."

"You've done everything you can, Jon," Ed says. Strawman sucks in a long breath, nods.

Looks down at the bandage on his arm, stained from the inside with his own blood and the outside with Jason's. Shudders. Germaphobia, J remembers. Not serious, but real. And he did this anyway. How did he get such awesome friends. Such brave ones.

Jon strips off the thin yellow-white gloves, looks for somewhere to throw them away, wrinkles his nose and puts them back in the zip-loc they came out of, stows it away. They've wrecked the place pretty thoroughly, but he's still not going to litter. That's Jon Crane for you. He goes off to get his mask and costume-gloves back and J forgets about him, more or less, because he's just felt a flutter against his fingertips and his other hand skates away from Jason's mouth to seek out the heavier pulse in his throat.

It's back. It's growing steady, growing stronger—

Jason draws in a larger breath, suddenly. The gap between his ribs yawns wide and the breath stutters, startled by the pain. "Hey," J says, sliding his hand back so he can squeeze Jason's. Nobody in the Court would do that. He'll know he's safe. "You're gonna be okay, Junior. Just keep breathing."

J has known his kid long enough that he almost trips over the silence where Jason should be grumbling something about the _chasm the size of Norway in his side, shut up._ "JJ?" he asks. Makes a circle on his palm with his thumb, automatic soothing.

Jason's eyes flick open. "Mission?"

Jokester recoils, just a little, because that's one of Talon's words and if they've driven him back there, then. Jason flinches. " _Did we get the thing?_ " he rephrases, spending strength he doesn't have to spare, voice scraped, and J squeezes his hand in apology.

"No," he admits.

At that, Red Hood grimaces and tries to sit up, falls back with a gasp, the incision between his ribs oozing blood markedly faster. "Careful!" J exclaims belatedly. He caught Jason around the shoulders with his free arm, but no matter how gently he eases him back down, he can't undo whatever damage just re-happened.

Jason rolls his eyes, pulling his hand free to brace against the table, and his stomach tenses up like he's about to try again.

"Don't _move_ , Hood," Strawman snaps. Picks up the gory little pellet of silver and for a second looks like a true living nightmare, brandishing it, all burlap and bloodstains and spidery, jutting limbs. "I just dug this out of your _heart._ "

Jason's eyes cut away. His right hand twitches, as if remembering his mind-controlled fixation on stabbing Strawman in the throat. "Thanks," he says. "Uh, thanks everybody. Sorry about the…"

"Could have happened to any one of us," says Basil.

Jason huffs out air in a way that makes the corners of his eyes crinkle in pain, and clearly means 'but it was me.' "It's all a little blurry after he got me," he says. Moves one more time like he wants to sit up, and J lifts him before he can tear anything else open. Blurry it may be, but if he remembers being carved up like a turkey on this table at _all,_ that's a great reason to want to feel less exposed. And he's conscious now, he gets to make his own decisions, even if they're stupid. Once he's sitting upright, leaning heavily on J, he looks around and asks, "What happened to Blood?"

"He teleported out," reports Ed. "With the thing we were here to intercept, of course."

"Wayne will have it by now," says Basil. He's stopped leaning on Enigma, but there are still telltale signs that he'd really be better off if he would at least sit down, if not let himself melt a little.

"But it's okay," J interjects, squeezing gently around Jason's shoulders. "It was the Scarabaeus like our contact thought, not the second Ring of Kur-Alet. It hasn't responded to anyone since Sendak died. It's just a collector's piece."

"It's the manifestation of Khepri. You _do not_ let somebody obsessed with power possess the physical form of a _god._ "

Which, well. Yeah.

"Well," Enigma says, pressing at the corner of his domino mask the way he does when the spirit gum starts weakening, "Owlman's god complex aside, we should probably get out of here before something else horrible happens."

He makes a good point. They are in an evil wizard's bedroom. That is generally not a good place to be.

It's also not a good place to leave approximately a gallon of Jason's blood. For Jason-of-the-Blood to play with. Jokester's not an expert on magic, but he knows blood is serious business. Even if Owlman probably has a sample somewhere, there's no need to just leave it slathered everywhere.

"We should prob'ly mop up before we leave," he observes.

Ed opens his mouth to say something, probably sardonic, about J's sudden housekeeping urges—and okay, guilty as charged, but _he_ always knows where everything is, and if Ed just thought for a second he'd figure out why it matters now, science-brain or no—but never gets to the words because there's a sound of footsteps in the hall and the click of the heavy paneled door unlatching from the outside. Everyone tenses for a fight, even Jason who shouldn't be moving.

And the door swings open…on Heat Sink and Deep Freeze. She's sunk into the half-crouch she prefers for fighting, hands upraised, with Victor's ice-guns held outstretched, poking over her shoulders from behind.

The two hero groups hold still for a long second, threatening each other, before Ed awkwardly lowers his stick, J laughs at all of them, and Crystal straightens up, shoving back the few wild curls that have escaped from her braid and casing the room with almost professional swiftness. The blood and mess, Reformer's shakiness, the deep gouge in Jason's torso and, more unusually, his shirtlessness and position sitting on a table, with his dad helping him sit up. The complete lack of any enemies whatsoever. "Wow. What did we miss?"

"Excitement," says Jon ruefully.

"What is, five minutes of combat followed by a freestyle surgical demo," says Ed. Basil steps on his foot.

Jason snorts again, and it seems to hurt less this time. "Sorry," J tells him. Failing the 'mission objective' doesn't bother him personally so much, but he's not calling this a success until Red Hood's fully recovered. He really wishes he could have come up with some other way.

"Don't even. You saved me, _again._ Just like you promised last time I got cut up on a table. If you let the headgame get to you, he wins. That goes for everybody," he adds, shooting a pointed look at Strawman, who did the cutting up. "I _owe you one_."

"Well said," declaims Freeze. When everyone looks at him, he shrugs, as much as his suit will allow. "I don't know what happened, but I approve of the sentiment."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Khepri is one of my favorite Egyptian gods, but since this is a mirror universe The Scarab must have been a villain. (Hero Louis Sendak lived into his eighties.) The Rings of Kur-Alet were a time-traveling device; no one wants Owlman to have that.


End file.
